Icons of a Golden Age

Post-World War II Classic and Concept Car Designs Take a Front Seat in Florida

It was after World War II, and the country was going into overdrive. Freeways were good, the suburbs represented the new frontier, and the dream house had a two-car garage.

When you step into “The Great Age of American Automobiles,” an exhibition now at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, through June 23, you’re caught in the headlights of a 1959 Cadillac Cyclone, a concept car with radar lights, jet exhausts and a retractable glass roof bubble reminiscent of the cockpit of a fighter jet. Surrender.

The Cyclone is the lead concept car in a group of experimental automobiles temporarily parked in the museum and surrounded by scores of renderings illustrating daring proposals for cars that could, and sometimes did, roll off the assembly line during Detroit’s golden age, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Despite the sophistication of the designs and the suave graphic techniques with which they were rendered, it was an age of innocence. You were meant to drive these designs into a horizon of infinite progress. The materialism was shaped by ideals.

These and other little-known, little-seen national treasures were prototypes usually produced for styling rather than driving. The oldest of the five cars on display is the impossibly swank Newport LeBaronby Chrysler, a 1940 convertible dual-cowl phaeton. Streamlined in long, voluptuous curves, with hideaway lights, two fold-down windshields and a lightweight aluminum body, it is the dinosaur of the group,because the war terminated the breed, and it bore no progeny. Six of these showboats were actually produced, and they belonged to the likes of Lana Turner and William Chrysler himself. It was unapologetically luxurious—glamour on wheels.

Between 1941 and the year of the next car, the 1958 Chrysler 300D, with flying fins and a wraparound windshield, auto design went through a sea change. Designers left behind the let-them-eat-cake attitude of the LeBaron in favor of the more democratic pitch of a mass-market car tinged with intimations of a promising future. They abandoned the old machine age in favor of a newer one starring the airplane: Designers were borrowing heavily from jet design to infuse their creations with notions of great speed and power.

The Cadillac Cyclone was so streamlined that it’s almost hard to tell in which direction the car might drive, as though it could break the sound barrier in reverse. The Chrysler 300D belongs to a family of cars that were actually produced: Big, generous and gestural in profile, it was perfectly scaled and engineered for the nation’s new network of long-distance highways. Another Chrysler (1963), its body shaped like a jet fuselage (it bears a strong visual relationship to the Thunderbird of the same period), was an experimental omnivore with a turbine engine running on vegetable oil, kerosene, jet fuel, diesel and unleaded gasoline. Of the 50 turbine cars that were produced, in 1963, nine survive.

It’s hard to peel your eyes off the glinting chrome, because the concept cars are showstoppers, but after your heartbeat has quieted, you gradually start focusing on the renderings, a world unto themselves. Many of the tableaux were done by students and professionals, trained at two of the few design centers in the United States: Art Center College, now in Pasadena, California, and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In programs supported by major auto companies after the war, students were taught to imagine, develop and present cars of the near and even distant future on the poster boards displayed in the exhibition.

Advertising had come into its own, and the seductive renderings were the first step in a long food chain of marketing. These were meant to sell either the concept or the designer, or both, to car companies. Styling sold cars, and designers were the princes of the great automobile empires.

The renderings obeyed certain conventions. Most were drawn in three-quarter views, to show the front and the side simultaneously. Frequently, the designs elegantly revealed the subconscious of the vehicle by showing jets flying overhead, as though the cars had flight in mind. A panel for the “Futuramic Oldsmobile” shows a rocket above, with text advising: “Rocket Ahead with Oldsmobile.”

Or the cars are parked in front of modern buildings, which themselves implied a progressive future of Modernism. But if architectural design of the time lacks the heated appeal of these cars, it was because Modernist ideology demanded that buildings be designed from the inside out: The results were cool to the touch. Notions of aerodynamic streamlining, aided by the needs of advertising, gave car designers the excuse to work from the outside in. Many renderings, such as one of the 1962 Oldsmobile Super 88, by Stephen J. Pojanski, shown with two tennis players in the background—illustrated by James M. Crabbe, Jr.—emphasize an association with sports, highlighting the athleticism and performance of cars and evoking bodies in motion.

Still, the designers opened the door to create stunning interiors, and although they aimed at approximating the comfort of a living room, they transferred the notion of the jet to the inside, with bucket seats and dashboards that recall high-tech instrument panels.

The scores of drawings in the exhibition belong to the Boston collector Frederic A. Sharf, who amassed the works by contacting the designers themselves or their heirs, often buying entire archives. Each panel is a storyboard for a product, and almost all were realistically rendered, complete with gleaming chrome.

Some were a conceptual and technological reach. In 1947 Jean Weaver designed the Bendix Helicopter Bus, and in 1956 Evan Sharer proposed the Aerocar, a cross between a car and a Piper Cub. The spectacularly futuristic 1950 Cadillac Coupe de Sabre, with fins, spit out high-speed exhaust.

Although the designers were all influenced by other disciplines, especially high-tech transportation, the modern art movements of the time barely seemed to influence either the car designs or the renderings. Cars’ designers were like figurative artists drawing bodies rather than abstractions. Only occasionally does a hint of the contemporary art world enter a design, as in the vaguely Abstract Expressionist 1967 illustration by Frank Backhouse of the Barracuda, with a dramatically splotchy background that energizes the image. One of the more abstract renderings—a 1958 interior styling proposal for Cadillac by Louis Drake—shows details of an elegant dashboard set against a completely black background. The knobs, steering wheel and pedals float in bottomless space.

The computer has eclipsed the whole tradition of hand-drawn presentations, and this breed of cars belongs to a time that is now past, a time before concerns about mileage, carbon-dioxide emissions and the high price of gas. The cars were shamelessly big, powerful and beautiful, with soaring fins and roaring V-8 engines. They were the vehicles of the new utopia. Seen in the rearview mirror, they are the artifacts of an incredibly creative moment in American cultural history.